The cost of sending unsolicited bulk email, or “spam”, to a recipient is generally so low that, by 2003, up to 30% of total email traffic was spam. (see Growth of Spam Email. visionedgemarketing.com. Retrieved 13 Jun. 2017). The prevalence of spam can undermine the practicality of email as an effective business or personal tool. While government legislation, such as the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and other anti-spam techniques have had some impact in mitigating the adverse effects of spam, the volume of spam sent is still very high and increasingly consists not only of advertisements, but often includes malicious links or content, such as malware. (see Spam and phishing in Q1 2016, May 12, 2016, securelist.com).
Malware, including viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, spyware, adware and other malicious software is becoming an increasingly costly part of doing business using computer networks. Cybercrime damage is predicted to grow from three trillion dollars in costs in 2015 to six trillion dollars annually by 2021 (see, e.g., CSO Security Business Report, Jun. 15, 2017). Panda Labs™ reported capturing eighteen million new malware samples in the third quarter of 2016 alone, for an average of 200,000 new malware samples a day. According to a report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (June 2016), about 4,000 ransomware attacks occurred per day in 2016. Kaspersky™ reported a rise in ransomware attacks between January of 2016 to September 2016 from once every two minutes to once every 40 seconds. Phishing emails including ransomware grew by over 97% during the third quarter of 2016 (PhishMe™ 2016 Q3 Malware Review). As such, the importance of associates of an enterprise understanding the threat of malicious emails is ever increasing. Nonetheless, even users who claim to know the risks of unknown links in emails, click on the links in the emails they receive (Z. Benenson, Friedrich-Alexander University).
The rise in malware attacks associates with a rising concern over identity theft and identity fraud. In 2017, EQUIFAX™ announced a data breach affecting 143 million consumers worldwide. As such, there is a rapidly growing and urgent need for reliable authentication of electronic communications.
It would therefore be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for efficiently determining which received emails pose a threat to a user and which received emails are benign. It would also be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for preventing malicious emails from being received by a recipient, while facilitating safe receipt of non-malicious emails. It would be further be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for preventing receipt of bulk unsolicited emails and/or otherwise undesirable communications. It would also be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for reliably authenticating and verifying an identity of a sender of an electronic communication.